Rock Springs, Wyoming

Before we left Pinedale this morning, we found a great little hippy coffee shop. I asked the waitress why there wasn't a place like this in Pinedale 40 years ago when I hitchhiked into town with my dog and longhairs had to tuck their hair up under their cowboy hats so they wouldn't be attacked with a pair of sheep shearing shears. She had no clue, of course, being only in her late 2o's and clueless about what was happening in the late 60's. When I first came to Wyoming, hippies were not exactly welcome. I do remember the Stagecoach Bar in Wilson, just outside of Jackson, where the cowboys and hippies had a sort of truce. I once saw some guy play Yakkety Sax on a Duck-call at an open mic Sunday. The previous act was a young cowgirl singing D-I-V-O-R-C-E (a Tammy Wynette classic, for those of you too young to remember.) We drove south 99 miles to Rock Springs, a rather depressing coal mining town on the Wyoming/Utah/Colorado border. Met up with my friend Bruce and went to a brew-pub for dinner. Didn't take a lot of pictures, because the drive from Pinedale to Rock Springs is through a hundred miles of sage brush flats, with the distinguishing feature being a 20 foot tall sandy bluff above another hundred square mile sage brush flat. We did see some beautiful Indian Paint brush. There were also a few wind-mills pumping water into stock tanks and a few natural gas rigs pumping gas into pipelines that Alaskans are wetting their pants dreaming of. Outside of Pinedale, which was a typical western cow-town when I worked here, we saw llamas, of all things. It felt a little like the time I went back to East Conway, New Hampshire and found a field of arugula in my Uncle Stubba's hay-field. What's going on here? The thing about getting older is that everything changes except your memories, and your memories are subject to very subjective interperatation. We have about 13 hours of driving from here to Truth or Consequences. We'll probably take 3 days to do that. In the back of my mind I've been a little worried about how we'll deal with the 90 degree heat. This afternoon set my mind at ease. It was 87 degrees, and I hardly broke a sweat. The humidity is low, there's a breeze, and as long as I don't have to bust my ass framing a house I can deal with this, no sweat. Tomorrow, we're off to Colorado.